Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

Sunday, October 21, 2012

As I've mentioned, I'm mostly too busy to blog these days. But I wanted to share this, from an occasional column published in the Guardian by Wayne Gooderham, who posts the handwritten dedications he finds in secondhand books:

To my darling Rose,I once read this in a novel about Chinese life:
"Success. What is it? A bubble that breaks at the touch. A shallow dream
that too often ends in bitterness and despair. . . .